Peter Drahos at 50th anniversary of the Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition

On 12 May 2016, Professor Peter Drahos delivered the KeyNote Address at the 50th anniversary celebration of the Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition. The official ceremony was held in the Imperial Hall of the Munich Residence, Munich and was attended by more than 400 invited guests, including officials, academics, lawyers and judges.

The topic of Professor Drahos’ lecture was the relationship between legal ontologies and the role of property rights in innovation. The ontology implicit in Hobbes’ Leviathan assumes that a sovereign state sets property rights in the interests of citizens. This account of property rights does not capture deeper processes of change in capitalism, especially the relationship between regulatory networks and their impact on the direction of innovation in capitalism. An understanding of innovation requires an ontology of process that focuses on the dynamics of networked regulation.

On day 2 of the celebrations Professor Peter Drahos made the concluding observations at the Academic Symposium that was held to discuss the Institute’s research activities.